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Comment by fsflover | Hacker News Reader

It will matter for yourself and for the companies that support user freedom. Sent from my Librem 5.

It doesn’t actually matter, because your phone is only working as a coincidence. Every website and app is tested for Google phones and iPhones. If you lose the ability to do something one day, the chances of you getting that functionality back without major effort from your phone manufacturer or the kindness of bored people working for free, is essentially zero.

My phone runs a desktop GNU/Linux OS with desktop Firefox (or Chromium if installed). If Firefox on desktop stops showing websites correctly, we will have a larger problem than an unsupported niche phone.

Then you’re not using a phone. You’re using a computer which happens to have phone capabilities. Surely you can see how this isn’t particularly useful for most people?

No, I can't. What's the problem?

On modern phones, 99% of interactivity for 99% or users comes via the App Store. Many websites will actively ducktype and send phones to an App Store, which just becomes a broken link on your laptop-with-LTE. Hell, nowadays, some sites will cripple interactions via phone browsers to encourage app use.

If you’re downloading 200 mb pages every time because you’re loading desktop pages on your phone, it’ll be pretty slow and inefficient.

So what are you suggesting? Giving up? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50229490

Also PWAs can use local storage.

You asked me to explain why it’s not useful to most people and I did. I don’t particularly care what people do with this information, I just find it annoying to see incomplete pictures.

How's your banking apps run on that?

With the money you save by not using Apple, you can afford the cheapest phone compatible with your bank, if they don't have internet banking.

Sure, if you want to carry 2 phones.

I probably never opened one of my banking apps away from home. My main use for them is to authorize the operations I'm doing from my computer. I think that I could keep an Android phone in a drawer and use it as a costly and inconvenient hardware token. By the way, for some reasons credit card companies are doing 2FA by SMS which is both stupid (security wise) and convenient (to break out from Android or iOS.)

I expect that the real problem with using a Linux phone would be WhatsApp, Google Maps (the navigation part), OSMAnd. Telegram desktop maybe works.

I switched to a bank not forcing me into the American duopoly.

Right up until you send someone with an iPhone a text message or email someone with a Gmail account...

What happens then?

The pixels on their screen turn green instead of blue, and they get mad that you reminded them that Apple is a conscious choice they made instead of something they were forced into.

Then your data is in the hands of the same people taking their data and sold to all the same people.

Except much less data is leaked and sold, because not everyone uses gmail or sms.

Most people use some sort of service where the owner sells their data. Certainly it's better to have our own open source platform that you control but interacting with the outside world in anyway exposes you to data harvesting again.

So your solution is to give up? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50229490

No, I'm moving off Apple to open source hardware/software for my phone. I'm just aware of where things leak and act accordingly.

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